I’ve been tired and uninspired. I went back to old notes, looking for the next essay, and something won’t leave me alone — though nothing is sweeping me away either. I’ve been trying to write about platitudes, edutainment, the infantilisation of adults in organisations. Every thread I pull leads me back to something I’ve already written. But underneath the familiar complaints, there’s a structural opposition I haven’t properly explored, I think.

On one side: the trainer-as-entertainer. “Educational vaudevillians” — I wrote this in the margin and it still strikes me as honest. It’s what I’m asked to be more often than I’m comfortable with. People who package learning as spectacle, who arrive with a pre-designed emotional trajectory and a room full of adults whose job, for the next forty-five minutes, is to be moved along it. They confuse engagement with entertainment. They confuse accessibility with the removal of difficulty. They treat a room full of people as an audience to be managed rather than a group to be met.

On the other side: the comedian. Who does something that looks identical on the surface — performs, entertains, holds a room’s attention — but operates by a completely different logic. The difference isn’t style. It’s direction.

Jon Stewart tells a story about interviewing Donald Rumsfeld.¹ He’d prepared thoroughly. Had his intention locked in — he was going to prosecute the case about selling the Iraq war. Right at the beginning he went in: “So when you guys were selling the war—” Rumsfeld pushed back: “Well, we didn’t sell it, we presented a case.” Stewart pushed: “You presented all the positive cases, and that’s a sales job.” Rumsfeld again: “No, I didn’t, really. I presented the case.” And Stewart, so intent on the architecture of his prepared argument, moved on. Blew right past it.

That night he realised: the entire conversation should have lived in the difference between “selling” and “presenting.” Everything was there — the evasion, the reframing, the structure of political dishonesty — compressed into a single word choice. But his intention had made him myopic. He’d put blinders on. He was, in his own words, so up his own ass that he missed the thing that was right in front of him.

Stewart calls this “the problem with being present” — that intention, the very quality we’re taught to admire (preparation, focus, knowing what you want to achieve), can be the thing that makes you blind. Not bad intention. Not laziness. The intention itself.

The comedian — and here I’m thinking not of Stewart the interviewer but of the comedian as craftsperson — seems to live in a different discipline, even if they’d never use those words. They walk on stage with material, yes, but with the willingness to abandon it. The room shifts — silence, restlessness, a cough — and they register the shift. Drop a bit. Pick up whatever the room just offered. A set that works identically every night is a dead set. The room has to get in. The performer has to let it.

More than that: the comedian fails publicly and uses the failure. A joke bombs, and they comment on the bombing, and that becomes the joke. The silence before the laugh. The bit that doesn’t land. Failure isn’t an accident to be concealed but material to be metabolised in real time.

The corporate trainer or facilitator typically does the opposite. Arrives with a journey, a designed arc, a sequence of activities tested and timed. If the room resists, the response is to push harder. More energy. A poll. A breakout exercise. Anything to pull attention back to the plan. The audience’s role is to be moved along the arc. Their resistance is a problem to be solved, not information to be used. And failure — an exercise that falls flat, a silence that wasn’t scheduled — is something to power through, never something to dwell in.

And here I arrive at something I scribbled in my notes that I think is the thesis, buried under all the rest: querer influenciar sem deixar ser-se influenciado é manipulação. Wanting to influence without letting yourself be influenced is manipulation. Not because the intentions are bad — most facilitators genuinely want to help. But the structure is one-directional. It wants to change people without being changed by them. Stewart’s Rumsfeld regret is the proof by negation: the moment he let his intention override his attention, the conversation died.²

Self-deprecation is part of this, too. Comedians make themselves the first target — this is beyond technique, I believe it to be an epistemological commitment. If I can laugh at myself, I can be wrong. If I can be wrong, you can trust that I’m not just performing certainty at you. The corporate speaker establishes credentials. Authority. The right to be listened to. Which is fine — I’ve done that, I was that person numerous times. I’ve embodied authority without the risk of being wrong. That is called instruction. And instruction that can’t be altered by the people it addresses — well, we have a word for that.

I realise I’ve been circling this opposition for years without naming it. The notes I started with — platitudes, edutainment, gamification — are symptoms.³ The comedian-consultant opposition is the structure underneath. Not because comedians are sages and consultants are charlatans — that would be its own platitude. But the comedian’s craft preserves something that corporate learning culture has systematically engineered out: the possibility of failure in real time. The willingness to not know what will happen next. And as we’ve grown accustomed to the erosion of this difference, we distinguish less and less between what is meaningful and what is merely spectacular.

Maybe that is the essay.

1. From The Problem With Jon Stewart podcast, “Jon Talks With Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase” (October 2021). The anecdote refers to Stewart’s 2011 interview with Rumsfeld on The Daily Show. ↩︎
2. I’ve explored how conversations collapse when they shift from mutual exploration to one-directional certainty in “Dreams Are Madness Waiting for a Sane Explanation.” ↩︎
3. Symptoms I’ve diagnosed elsewhere from different angles. See “Post-Depth: The Plasticization of Profundity” and “On Relational Greenwashing.” ↩︎